A Structuring Chaos Blog

For Once, I Said It Simpler

A caught this opinion by Adam Hachschild on WWI… you’ll see a lot of articles on this for the next couple years. He does a great job of explaining why the Great War was so deadly. But I have to admit, I say it a lot more simply when I teach my strategy classes.

The reason that WWI was so deadly is that lethal technology advanced significantly, while battle strategy did not.

This could be the first time in a long time that I said something more simply than someone else.

You could argue that the Civil War in the US was similar, but not really. There were huge advances in that time: the Minie ball, the cartridge, the cannon… but they were still nascent. It was only when battle tactics of the mid 1800’s met the trench, barbed wire, and the machine gun that things got really catastrophic.